How to Wrestle a Girl, Venita Blackburn
How to Wrestle a Girl, Venita Blackburn
List: $17.50 | Sale: $12.25
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How to Wrestle a Girl
Stories

Author: Venita Blackburn

Narrator: Venita Blackburn, Jamie K. Brown, Jamal Henderson, Angel Pean, Tashi Thomas

Unabridged: 5 hr 49 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/07/2021


Synopsis

"How to Wrestle a Girl is a work of stunning grace and rhythm. In these stories Venita Blackburn reminds us she is a writer unlike any other, her stories propelled by voice and wit and harsh beauty." --Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, author of Friday Black

Hilarious, tough, and tender stories from a farseeing star on the rise

Venita Blackburn’s characters bully and suffer, spit and tease, mope and blame. They’re hyperaware of their bodies and fiercely observant, fending off the failures and advances of adults with indifferent ease. In “Biology Class,” they torment a teacher to the point of near insanity, while in “Bear Bear Harvest™,” they prepare to sell their excess fat and skin for food processing. Stark and sharp, hilarious and ominous, these pieces are scabbed, bruised, and prone to scarring.

Many of the stories, set in Southern California, follow a teenage girl in the aftermath of her beloved father’s death and capture her sister’s and mother’s encounters with men of all ages, as well as the girl’s budding attraction to her best friend, Esperanza. In and out of school, participating in wrestling and softball, attending church with her hysterically complicated family, and dominating boys in arm wrestling, she grapples with her burgeoning queerness and her emerging body, becoming wary of clarity rather than hoping for it.

A rising star, Blackburn is a trailblazing stylist, and in How to Wrestle a Girl she masterfully shakes loose a vision of girlhood that is raw, vulnerable, and never at ease.

About Venita Blackburn

Venita Blackburn is the author of the story collections Black Jesus and Other Superheroes, which won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize and was a finalist for the 2018 Young Lions Fiction Award and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, and How to Wrestle a Girl, which was a finalist for the 2022 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction and the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker online, The Paris Review, Pleiades, Bat City Review, and American Short Fiction. She is a faculty member in the creative writing program at Fresno State University and the founder and president of Live, Write, an organization devoted to offering free creative writing workshops for communities of color.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Meike on November 13, 2021

Blackburn's second collection contains 30 short stories, most of them focusing on a young girl who recently lost her father and the struggles she, her sister and her now widowed mother go through. The girl feels more and more attracted to her friend Esperanza, details experiences with friends at sch......more

Goodreads review by Dona's on July 25, 2023

I found HOW TO WRESTLE A GIRL by Verita Blackburn on the Libby app. Check for your local library on the app and read great books for free!πŸ“š The audiobook is read by a group of individuals, who each perform their stories beautifully. Some, brilliantly. I recommend the audiobook for a short, gripping r......more

Goodreads review by Sunny on August 21, 2023

Written by someone deeply steeped and invested in the work and legacy of queer and/or female Black literary figures......more

Goodreads review by el on June 07, 2022

when venita blackburn flies, she soars. when she falls short, i'm left scrambling to understand the significance of certain snapshots and narrative choices. there were a few standout moments in this collection for meβ€”"not for resale," "smoothies," "young woman laughing into her salad," and "trial of......more

Goodreads review by Erik on August 12, 2021

Venita Blackburn's second collection of short stories, How to Wrestle a Girl is a dreamscape of life for a young, Black person with shifting identities and an unmoored future. The book is split into two distinct parts. Part 1 is truly a story collection - each story asks questions about community, ra......more